You can use the terms "and" & "or" in your search; "or" phrases are resolved
first, then the "and" phrases. For example, searching for "black hole and
galaxy or universe" will find articles that have the phrase "black hole" in them
and also have either "galaxy" or "universe" in them. Please note that other
search syntax like quote marks, hyphens, etc. are not currently supported.

When you view web pages with matches to your search, the terms you searched for will be highlighted in yellow.

If you are aware of an interesting new academic paper (that has been published in a peer-reviewed journal or has appeared on the arXiv), a conference talk (at an official professional scientific meeting), an external blog post (by a professional scientist) or a news item (in the mainstream news media), which you think might make an interesting topic for an FQXi blog post, then please contact us at forums@fqxi.org with a link to the original source and a sentence about why you think that the work is worthy of discussion. Please note that we receive many such suggestions and while we endeavour to respond to them, we may not be able to reply to all suggestions.

Please also note that we do not accept unsolicited posts and we cannot review, or open new threads for, unsolicited articles or papers. Requests to review or post such materials will not be answered. If you have your own novel physics theory or model, which you would like to post for further discussion among then FQXi community, then please add them directly to the "Alternative Models of Reality" thread, or to the "Alternative Models of Cosmology" thread. Thank you.

Thomas Ray: "It's easy to get wound around the axle with black hole thermodynamics,..."
in“Spookiness”...

RECENT ARTICLESclick titles to read articles

Why Time Might Not Be an Illusion
Einstein’s relativity pushes physicists towards a picture of the universe as a block, in which the past, present, and future all exist on the same footing; but maybe that shift in thinking has gone too far.

The Complexity Conundrum
Resolving the black hole firewall paradox—by calculating what a real astronaut would compute at the black hole's edge.

Quantum Dream Time
Defining a ‘quantum clock’ and a 'quantum ruler' could help those attempting to unify physics—and solve the mystery of vanishing time.

Our Place in the Multiverse
Calculating the odds that intelligent observers arise in parallel universes—and working out what they might see.

Most once mysterious questions concerning the concept of time have been resolved satisfactorily. While reviewing the progress, many well known issues are presented in refreshingly new ways: Zeno’s arrow paradox, time in relativity theory, etc. The still unresolved issue is a fully relational resolution from which time is emergent. The concept of time is closely linked with Many World Interpretations (MWI). Reviewing problems of quantum mechanics (QM), unitarity is stressed to be the most severe, because it gives rise to religious interpretations. Extremely low probability of after-live is not enough suppression, because the “dead fraction” does not count towards the statistical ensemble in a many minds MWI. The proper decoherence mechanism will cut off extremely low probabilities, resulting in zeros (impossibility). A simple physical system, e.g. decaying nuclei, shows that these problems are closely related with the issue of synchronization and emergence of time. In the same spirit as describing a quantum computation as put together from computations performed in parallel universes, similarly time is arising from the interference of MWI branches. While trying to let time emerge in the multiverse structure, the extremely low probability cutoff directs from the outset only towards extremely small corrections to QM that do not conflict with current observations.

Author Bio

Sascha Vongehr is employed as theoretical and experimental physicist at the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Nanjing. He started to study philosophy in Germany, obtained his M. Sc. in string theory at the University of Sussex, and his Ph. D. from the University of Southern California, 2005. Current areas are cosmology and nanotechnology. He worked on two-time theory, helium clusters and neuroscience of the visual system (postdoc).

I loved the way you presented, in a lucid and profound manner, the problems related to the time, block time, and the many worlds interpretation. Interesting the small probability cutoff mechanism via decoherence.